


Muscle Memory

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-14
Updated: 2013-06-14
Packaged: 2017-12-14 23:41:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/842783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oh no, I got me some more bingo cards. PREPARE THE ONSLAUGHT OF FICLETS.  This is for 'lost'.  I figured...what bigger thing could be lost than yourself?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Muscle Memory

Skids waited until the door closed behind him, shutting him into his hab suite, before he let the smile fall from his face. He wasn’t an actor, and all the superlearning skill Shockwave had seen in him hadn’t really covered ‘feigning being okay’.  Still, people only dug where they thought there was something to find, so he figured he managed to appear just about as screwed up as most other mechs here, no more, no less.  

None of them were what could be considered ‘well-adjusted’--after a few million years of constant war, danger, loss, how could any of them be?  So all he had to do was not flip out like Fort Max or be as abrasive as Whirl, and it was ‘nothing to see here, move along’ for everyone, that polite averting of eyes you do in hopes people don’t look too closely at you, either.

Post-war manners, Skids figured.  

Chromedome had sent him back, with more questions than answers, the former mnemosurgeon knowing something, holding that knowledge back from him.  It grated. It burned, to have someone know something he didn’t--that almost compulsion to learn and know that had driven him all those years. What did it take, how bad was it, to make a former Institute mnemosurgeon look at you with pity?  

Something bad.  It had to be something beyond bad. Did he kill someone? Hurt someone? Just stood by and watch?  Was he evil?

He had thought it was sort of freeing, at first, honestly, that idea that he could be anyone, the idea of having almost no past, the chance to start again, to take, possibly a new path.  But too much freedom is its own terror, in a way, too much potential, too many options: it was overwhelming.  

He had the opportunity to write his life anew, to make himself whatever he wanted: hero, jokester, friend, warrior.  But why did the past refuse to let go? He could understand someone like Whirl, who wore his past every day, like a scar, who had to live with what had been done to him, every turn in the mirror. Whirl's choices were limited, by what he was and what he had done.  But Skids...he was a mystery to everyone, it seemed.  He'd thought, at first, that someone would give him a clue, and that maybe he wouldn't want it. But he'd thought the offer would be there, at least, an 'I knew you when' or 'that one time....'.  Something to give him a foundation, even if it was merely a platform to leap from, a thing to shake his head at and say ‘that’s not me anymore’.

None, nothing. And that emptiness, as though he simply hadn't existed from the start of the war until they'd found him, was terrifying. At least Tailgate had an excuse. At least Tailgate had dots to connect, though small and slow.  Skids had...a chasm without a bridge.  He had who he had been and then whatever he was now, and the time between was simply blank, the absence of color and form.  

He remembered that someone had told him once that most people fear the future, for its blankness, instead of seizing it for its opportunity. Someone.

Someone.

Shockwave.  

That...hurt, more than he thought it would.  Ironic to have only a handful of vivid memories, and have them all poignant, bittersweet.  Because the Shockwave he'd known had been almost a beacon, bright and energetic, with the power and eagerness to move things forward.  They'd been friends, of a sort, the kind Shockwave had, where every one of his friends was obligated to him, bound to him in some complicated, intricate web of favor and exchange.  

Maybe, he thought, with that sort of lukewarm dread of an idol's armor being punctured, Shockwave had some reason to feel he needed to buy his friends.  Maybe it said something that he kept changing his deco, never content to be who or what he was.  

Maybe that's why he'd wanted his outliers, things that moved beyond their natural bounds, around him. Sometimes you exist in the gaze of others.

Skids hadn't seen Shockwave since that night. _That_ night.  The one in which he'd helped save Cybertron from outright war, and lost his dearest friend and mentor.  An awful transaction, uneven, unbalanced, especially when that sacrifice was in vain--it just delayed the start of the war. Zeta simply thought harder and darker. And who knows, if they hadn't disarmed that bomb, perhaps today there would be more than one mech alive who could say he was from Nyon.  And maybe that one mech wouldn't have the burden of being the one who had destroyed the city to keep it from fueling Zeta's mad desires.  

He wondered, not for the first time, what sort of burden Rodimus had carried from that awful night, and then he asked himself, trying to console himself, if maybe it was better sometimes not to remember. Maybe he was better off.

Skids shook his head, moving to the small maintenance facility in his quarters, flicking open the scanner to check his levels, almost idly, rotely, the kind of thing you did every day without thought, as a matter of habit.  And he'd probably done this, every night, during that dark span that was lost to memory--these hands had worked, these optics had read the scan to program it into the recharge slab controls--his entire body functioning smoothly, cleanly.

Except his memories.  

He'd heard Shockwave's voice, on a pirate radio in the bunker Orion had tucked them into, days later, and he'd known. He'd turned away even from the voice, the richness, the sleekness of the voice flattened to a strangely plummy monotone.  Whirl had fought the empurata damage to his vocalizer, the inability to express, by exploiting it for sarcasm: Shockwave, it seemed, didn't care enough to try.  

It wasn't Shockwave, Skids thought. That he remembered. He remembered thinking that: this isn't Shockwave. Shockwave is dead, gone, the very light that made him him extinguished, damped, and that body, that voice, that mind, was merely some gutted thing, a reanimated corpse.  

And what was Skids, then?

He looked up, catching sight of himself in the mirror, a face still familiar, but perhaps too much like a mask.  He forced a smile, that familiar, cocky, lopsided one he wore outside.

It fooled them. It didn’t fool him.  

Instead it just reminded himself of when that smile was young, when he’d been pettish that he hadn’t played a more important part in saving the world. Such arrogance. Such confidence. It felt like what he held onto was a tempered, battered fragment of it, but he didn’t know, couldn’t remember, the acts that had shaped it, worn it down.

He still wanted to be important, he still wanted to save the world, but it felt more driven, more neurotic, something he wanted to do to be real and stable and coherent in others’ optics.  And he knew he’d be living up to Shockwave’s promise of what he could be, a sort of dark irony that curled the edge of his grin like a burnt leaf.

It wouldn’t be redemption--he didn’t believe in that stuff anyway. But it would be, at least, logic, a neat, if twisted symmetry, things shaking into place, like prophecy thrown into Brownian motion.


End file.
